About Laura

Laura Pitone is married to Tom Cole and the mother of 5th grader Avery who attends the Healey School and 9th grader Ethan, who attends Somerville High School. The family owns a home on Rogers Ave. Laura has lived in Somerville for 15 years and in the Boston area for more than 20 years. Laura came here for college and stayed in Somerville for its diversity and small-scale urban environment.

Laura has degrees in engineering (MIT) and business (Babson College). For five years, she worked as a manufacturing engineer at General Electric on industry assignments such as improvement of a glass-cutting machine and also had managerial responsibility, supervising a unit of third shift workers. More recently, as a business and information technology consultant, she oversaw development of the web marketing strategy and site for State Street Corporation.

Laura is experienced in data analysis, team-building and budget management. She strongly believes in participatory leadership – decision-making as a true group effort. Her expertise in this area has helped make her an effective school leader able to synthesize the often widely different and strongly held opinions that families and educators have about how best to provide for their children.

Prior to serving on the School Committee, Laura has worked with parents, teachers and administrators on real educational issues and has also been a classroom volunteer. As a member of the Healey School Improvement Council for three years, Laura has helped lead the effort to unify two very different programs into a single design for the whole school. This work has included extensive collaboration with different school groups amidst several school leadership changes over a short period of time. As former co-chair of a Healey parent-teacher organization, Laura also worked on maintaining communications across school groups and on keeping participants motivated during the redesign process.

Laura also served on the Somerville City and Schools Children and Youth Study Team and was a member of the Somerville Special Education Parent Advisory Committee (SPED-PAC.) She enjoys gardening, biking and traveling and shares her home with two cats.